When I woke in this city one fine May Day morning I saw a small crowd, like a gathering stream,And though they were only a few hundred strong,They were singing old songs I’d not heard for so long That it seemed I was still in a dream.

‘O where are you going this fine May Day morning? And what are these flags that you carry so bright?’‘We are marching,’ they said, ‘in the steps of the dead,Of all those who have marched under banners of red, So that we may continue their fight’.

‘But why are you angry this fine May Day morning, When the Summer is wearing its holiday hat?’‘We are angry,’ they said, ‘that the people must payWith their jobs and their homes for the world’s disarray While the rich and the powerful grow fat.’

‘But what can you do on this fine May Day morning? When their lies are so many and you are so few?’‘Our strength’ they replied, ‘is not measured in numbers,For our songs have awoken the dead from their slumbers.’ And I listened and knew it was true.

For I heard in the crowd on this fine May Day morning The voices of those who had marched here before:In the fight for the Charter, for Land and for Bread,For the Eight-Hour Day, for the Haymarket dead, For the victims of hunger and war;

They were marching from Sedgemoor, from Newport and Burford, They came from Soweto and Moscow and Spain,And they carried their flags from Hanoi and HavanaTill it seemed that the city was one scarlet banner And it shone like a glittering plain.

And I watched as they marched on this fine May Day morning, Like a field full of folk by the banks of the Tyne,As strong as a river that reaches the sea,As old as the rings in a blossoming tree, And I saw that their banners were mine.

There is a long poem in Alan Morrison’s fantastic new collection Shabbigentile (Culture Matters, £9, available here) about the 1930s Left Book Club, invoking the idea of ‘red belles-lettres ringing red bells / Of rebellion’:

‘Now once more books need to be mobilised / Against the oncoming monsoon of moral / Panic and scapegoating in the face of a new / Gentrified fascism, a bespoke chauvinism... Poisoning the well of tolerant discourse.’

In many ways the whole collection is about mobilising books, ‘print-antidotes / To right-wing hegemonies.’ And in a book thick with references to Jack London, Dickens, Lukacs, Saint-Simon, Lukacs and John Davidson, Morrison knows that the best books are on our side.

As always, Morrison’s poetry is dense, eloquent and rich with information, ideas and arguments. There are some important long poems here, notably ‘Another Five Giants’ (about Tory and New Labour attacks on the Welfare State), ‘Not Paternoster Square’ (the Occupy Movement) and ‘St Jude and the Welfare Jew’ (racist tabloid newspapers accusing Jeremy Corbyn of anti-Semitism).

The title of the book is a play on ‘shabby genteel’ and an attack on the ways that a nominally Christian society like the UK contains within it the forces of neo-liberalism, austerity, racism and fascism:

boss i have heardsome human beans thinkhungry and homeless peopleare like cockroaches iam flattered at last some humans beans feelsorry for us poor insectshooray there is hope for some human beans after all either that or thehuman beans who think hungry and homeless people are like cockroachesare worse than cockroaches we would never be so unkind archy

Fearful Symmetry

for Sheree Mack

by Andy Croft

‘Each has a gift that Nature gave,But some their neighbour’s fame must crave.’- Ivan Krylov

The lion shakes its regal mane, The monkey thumps his chest, The narwhal waves its tusk, the crab his claws; The peacock flaunts its gorgeous train, The bowerbird his nest, The civet sprays her musk, the tiger roars, As they will: Creation on the catwalk dressed to kill.

What artist’s palette ’ere revealed Such bright and vivid hues? What hand or eye could frame such drop-dead threads?What cobbler’s last has ever heeled So many fuck-me shoes? This cattle-market game of turning heads Means your date Is either your next meal or else your mate.

Alas, far from the critics’ praise There dwells Arachne’s kin Whose intricate designs go unrewarded; Condemned by vain and boastful ways To sit alone and spin And know their silken lines are not applauded, Spiders must Live out their days in realms of gloom and dust.

Frustrated by their dark estate, The eight-legged tribe agreed To give a special prize to Nature’s spinners;So others might appreciate The art that spiders need, They asked their friends the flies to crown the winners. As it does, The teeming insect world began to buzz.

While waiting for the six-legged crowdTo hit the spiders’ gala,Each thought her own design beyond compare, Original, authentic, proud –But flies know that the parlourWhere spiders like to dine, that winding stair,Leads us straightTo something that no art can imitate.

And so, while other creatures sing And preen and prance and puff, This cobweb crew’s always the world’s outsiders; When artless Nature does its thing, And struts its gorgeous stuff, The little beady gaze of every spider’s Still on the prize, In realms of dust and dark, still counting flies.

It is twenty-five years this month since the assassination of Chris Hani, general secretary of the South African Communist Party and chief of staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe. Hani was also Mandela’s de facto deputy; his murder opened the way to the disappointments and betrayals of Thabo Mbeki and Joseph Zuma. Here is a poem by Andy Croft to mark the occasion.

‘Doodgeskiet’ means ‘dead’ in Afrikaans; Comrade B was Hani’s name inside Umkhonto we Sizwe; he was murdered in Boksburg; ‘Guptagate’ is the popular short-hand for the corruption that enmired the ANC under Zuma’s leadership. The poem is, of course, based on the old Wobbly song ‘Joe Hill’.

Doodgeskiet

by Andy Croft

in memory of Chris Hani

Last night I dreamed I saw the man Who murdered Comrade B,Says I, ‘you should be twelve months dead.’‘I never died,’ says he, ‘I never died,’ says he.

Andy Croft reviews a new book out about the communist composer Alan Bush.

The composer Alan Bush (1900-95) is usually described as a man of unresolved contradictions, an Establishment figure who was also a dissident, the outsider who enjoyed the comfortable life of the insider. Bush was Professor of Harmony and Composition at the Royal Academy of Music for over half a century but, on at least two occasions, he was blacklisted by the BBC. When his first piano concerto was performed on the BBC Third Programme in 1938, Adrian Boult led the orchestra and choir straight into the national anthem in order to “balance” the revolutionary implications of the chorale finale. And, although his first opera Wat Tyler won the 1951 Festival of Britain opera competition, it was only performed once in Bush’s lifetime in the UK. Like all his operas it was premiered in the GDR.

Joanna Bullivant’s newly published book, the first full-length study of Bush’s life and music, is long overdue and wholly to be welcomed. Despite the inexcusable cover price and a sometimes over-academic introduction, anyone interested in Alan Bush’s music should get their local library to stock it.

The author works hard to rescue Bush from the usual modernist and anti-communist orthodoxies that compare his work unfavourably to composers Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippet, or which routinely claim that he sacrificed his talent for his political commitments. Trying to separate Bush’s music and his politics is impossible, she argues, as both were bound up with his sense of his musical and moral responsibilities in an era of crisis.

At the heart of the book is an account of the many projects in the 1930s and 1940s — most notably the 1939 Festival of Music for the People — in which, working with the London Labour Choral Union and the Workers’ Music Association, Bush tried to take classical music out of the concert hall. There is an excellent discussion of Bush’s Cantata The Winter Journey in relation to Tippet’s A Child of Our Time and Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols and a suggestive comparison of the ritual elements in The Winter Journey and Britten’s Peter Grimes.

Bullivant explores the various competing influences on Bush’s thinking and practice, from Hanns Eisler to Arnold Schoenberg and Christopher Caudwell to Paul Hindemith. And, among Bullivant’s accounts of his four operas, is a fascinating study of the musical components of The Sugar Reapers, his opera about the Guyanese liberation struggle.

She is also good on Bush’s relations with those German composers such as Eisler, Georg Knepler and Ernst Meyer who came to London as political refugees after 1933. And, instead of the usual caricatures of Bush being a pawn of the GDR authorities, she argues that it was the other way round — Bush’s thinking and practice had a significant influence on the socialist state’s musical culture. And, for those critics who have dismissed Bush as a “Stalinist,” Bullivant reminds us that there were two sides to the cold war. According to Bush’s recently released MI5 files, during the so-called phoney war the secretary of the communist party’s William Morris Musical Society was an MI5 agent and when he was co-opted onto the party’s national cultural committee in 1950, his nomination papers were intercepted by MI5 and,in 1957, it prevented Bush travelling to British Guiana in order to research local musical traditions.

The book might have benefited from less theory and more biography, especially concerning Bush’s relationships with his principal librettists‚ among them Montagu Slater, with whom he wrote the Communist Manifesto Centenary pageant in 1948, Randall Swingler, who wrote the text for his first piano concerto and his wife Nancy, who wrote the words for three of his operas. Nevertheless, Bush emerges from this book as a major figure, one whose professional and political life was dedicated to creating a participative musical culture that was accessible, educational, enjoyable and radical.

Alan Bush, Modern Music and the Cold War by Joanna Bullivant (Cambridge University Press, £75). This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

It is very tempting to reduce these issues to questions of individual blame and shame, as the Guardian article did. However, we believe at Culture Matters that the problem of plagiarism is an inevitable consequence of the capitalistic corruption of poetry. Just as commercially motivated pressures on sportspeople turn essentially social and co-operative activities into matters of individualistic competition and excellence, encouraging cheating and drug-taking, so poetry is deformed and twisted from an essentially social art into a competitive, individualistic activity where new-ness and complete 'originality' is over-rated. This is the root cause of actual and alleged plagiarism.

So we are re-publishing Andy Croft's original article, because it puts all the issues into context. Andy Croft's argument is that poetry is essentially a collective and communist art, with the potential to overcome alienation and increase our sociality and connectedness. It belongs to everyone, cannot be owned nor become property, and is essentially committed to the common good of humanity.

At the end of the fourth film in the ‘Alien’ franchise, Alien Resurrection (1997), the film’s only two survivors are preparing to visit Earth. Although we have previously been told that it is a toxic ‘shithole’, one of them observes that from a distance the planet looks beautiful. ‘I didn't expect it to be,’ she says, ‘what happens now?’ The other gives a puzzled half-smile and shrugs, ‘I don't know. I'm a stranger here myself.’

The ‘stranger’ is Ellen Ripley, who has been fighting the xenomorph aliens ever since Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979). Her bewildered description of herself as a ‘stranger’ is one of cinema’s great understatements. For Ripley is a stranger, not only to a planet she has not seen for three hundred years, but to herself. Ripley was killed at the end of the third film, and has been resurrected as a clone with part-alien DNA. She does not yet understand the extent of her humanity or know just how much of an alien she is.

All the human characters are dead at the end of Alien Resurrection. The film’s only other survivor (played by Winona Ryder) is an android. Earlier in the film, when Ripley discovers that her companion is a robot, she observes, ‘I should have known. No human being is that humane.’ This is an idea that has been running through the series since Aliens (1986), when Ripley compares one of her companions to the aliens he is planning to sell to the Company’s weapons division – ‘I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage...’

Alien Resurrection was a bleak fin-de-siecle farewell to a century of violence, avarice, fear and cruelty, and a grim welcome to a new millennium in which we are estranged from each other and from ourselves by exaggerated fears of differences. Ripley is a familiar figure in the twenty-first century – an alien, a homeless exile whose children are dead, a stranger in a strange land.

ALIENATION AND POETRY

The phrase ‘I’m a stranger here myself’ is also a quotation from a song by Kurt Weill (another exile). Written with Ogden Nash for the 1943 Broadway hit One Touch of Venus, the song is a satirical comment on contemporary US life. In the musical, an ancient statue of the Greek goddess of sexual love (played by Mary Martin) comes alive in a New York museum. She is confused by the strangeness of the world in which she finds herself, especially by the apparent absence of love in the cold modern city:

‘Tell me is love still a popular suggestionOr merely an obsolete art?Forgive me for asking, this simple questionI'm unfamiliar with this partI am a stranger here myself.

Please tell me, tell a strangerMy curiosity goadedIs there really any dangerThat love is now out-moded?

I'm interested especiallyIn knowing why you waste itTrue romance is so freshlyWith what have you replaced it?’

As a study in alienation, One Touch of Venus may not have been as hard-hitting as The Threepenny Opera or Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, but it was nevertheless clearly shaped by Weill’s experiences in Weimar Germany, where hysterical ideas about ‘aliens’ of course carried toxic political meanings. In the musical it is the non-human alien who understands more about human happiness than the human characters. It is not an exaggeration to say that Venus is both ‘the heart of a heartless world’, and an example of the commodification of desire in a society where ‘all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away... all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’

Which brings us to Marx’s idea of entfremdung, the process by which, in class societies, we are alienated from Nature, from our work, from the products of our work, from each other and from ourselves. Each dramatic new stage of human social, economic and technological development has simultaneously pushed us farther apart from each other and from ourselves – property, slavery, money, territory, caste, class, religion, industrialisation, migration, urbanisation, mechanisation, militarisation, nationalism, empire, computerisation, globalisation...

Of course we all experience this ‘self-estrangement’ differently. As Marx argued in The Holy Family, although ‘the propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement,’

‘the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power, and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and in the reality of an inhuman existence.’

In a bewildering world where we feel ourselves to be strangers in our own lives, the false consolations of nostalgia, nationalism, chauvinism, religious fundamentalism and racism are tempting to many, especially to those with the least power. Each of these is an illusion ‘which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself’ (during international football tournaments there is always a greater concentration of England flags in those parts of our cities with the smallest economic or political stake in British society). But fearing ‘strangers’ will not make the world less strange; attacking ‘aliens’ cannot mitigate our alienation from ourselves.

On the other hand there are those forces that still pull us together – kinship, friendship, desire, solidarity, collectivity, utopianism, socialism. Despite all the commercial, cultural, social, economic and political pressures to emphasise our uniqueness and our separateness, the differences between us are not very great. We all share the same small planet, we breathe the same air and we share the same fate. And one of the ways in which we demonstrate and feel our common natures is through art. It is not just that creativity can raise individual ‘self-esteem’ or ‘well-being’. All artistic creation, whether individual or collective, amateur or professional, private or public represents a kind of resistance to the complex, centrifugal forces that push us apart. Art is both a reminder of our co-operative origins and a promise of a collective future. Art can be many things – painting, dance, music, literature, sculpture, poetry – but it cannot be property. As soon as a work of art is owned by one individual it is not shared; if it is not shared, then it is not art.

THE POWER OF POETRY

Poetry in particular contains the potential to connect writers to readers, and readers to each other. It can help us feel a little more connected to each other than usual. When any poet stands up to read in public they have to address the readers outside the page, the listeners across the room and beyond. Poetry can remind us what is significant and help us to imagine what is important. It can help to naturalise ideas and arguments by placing them within popular literary traditions. Anticipation and memory implicates reader and listener in the making of a line or a phrase and therefore in the making of the argument. This establishes a potentially inclusive community of interest between the writer/speaker and the reader/ audience – through shared laughter, anger or understanding.

According to George Thompson in Marxism and Poetry:

‘we find in all languages two modes of speech – common speech, the normal, everyday means of communication between individuals, and poetical speech a medium more intense, appropriate to collective acts of ritual, fantastic, rhythmical, magical... the language of poetry is essentially more primitive than common speech, because it preserves in a higher degree the qualities of rhythm, melody, fantasy, inherent in speech as such... And its function is magical. It is designed to effect some change in the external world by mimesis – to impose illusion on reality.’

Over the last five hundred years, poetry has lost many of its historic functions. Character has fled to the novel, dialogue to the stage, persuasion to advertising and public relations, action to cinema, comedy to television. This always seems to me to be an unnecessarily heavy price to pay for the development of the original ‘voice’ of the poet. But the shared, public music of common language and common experience remains its greatest asset – the power to communicate, universalise and shape a common human identity. The power of all poetry is still located in society – in the audience and not in the poet. Writing – in the sense of the composition of memorable language to record events that need remembering – is essentially a shared, collective, public activity. Poetry is essentially a means of communication, not a form of self-expression. Difficulty is only a virtue if the poem justifies the effort to understand it. Why write at all, if no-one is listening? If they think no-one is listening, poets end up talking only to each other, or to themselves. The poet Adrian Mitchell (who once observed that ‘most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’) put it like this:

‘In the days when everyone lived in tribes, poetry was always something which was sung and danced, sometimes by one person, sometimes by the whole tribe. Song always had a purpose – a courting song, a song to make the crops grow, a song top help or instruct the hunter of seals, a song to thank the sun. Later on, when poetry began to be printed, it took on airs. When the universities started studying verse instead of alchemy, poetry began to strut around like a duchess full of snuff. By the middle of the twentieth century very few British poets would dare to sing.’

It seems to me that this is still understood at a subterranean level within British society, a long way from the centres of cultural authority and the cult of the ‘new’. Poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kokumo, Moqapi Selassie, Benjamain Zephaniah and Jean Binta Breeze do not read their poems in public – they sing them. The most distinctive feature of an Urdu-Punjabi musha’ara (a marathon poetry-reading) is the level of audience participation. Poets do not always read their ‘own’ work. They often sing. And they are frequently interrupted by applause, by requests for a line to be read again, by the audience guessing the rhyme at the end of a couplet or by joining in the reading of well-known poems. This is a collective, shared poetry, the expression of a literary, linguistic and religious identity among a community whose first language is English, but whose first literary language is Urdu. And musha’ara attract hundreds of people of all ages.

POETRY AND COMMUNISM

There is something comparable about the role of poetry inside prison. Men who would not often go near a library in their ordinary lives, in prison can find solace and encouragement in reading and writing poetry. Prison magazines always carry pages of poetry. The Koestler Awards are an important part of the prison calendar. No-one is embarrassed to say that they like poetry in prison. There are certain poems – usually about love, heroin and regret – that prisoners take with them from one prison to another, copying them out and learning them by heart until the poems ‘belong’ to them.

In other words, the idea that language – and therefore poetry – belongs to everyone, is still felt most vividly among those who have been historically excluded from education and literacy by the forces of caste and class, empire and slavery.

The French Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou has moreover argued that it is not a coincidence that most of the great poets of the twentieth-century were communists (Hikmet, Brecht, Neruda, Eluard, Ritsos, Vallejo, Faiz, MacDiarmid, Aragon, Mayakovsky, Alberti, Darwish, Sanguineti, etc). For Badiou, there exists ‘an essential link between poetry and communism, if we understand “communism” closely in its primary sense’:

‘the concern for what is common to all. A tense, paradoxical, violent love of life in common; the desire that what ought to be common and accessible to all should not be appropriated by the servants of Capital. The poetic desire that the things of life would be like the sky and the earth, like the water of the oceans and the brush fires on a summer night – that is to say, would belong by right to the whole world... it is first and foremost to those who have nothing that everything must be given. It is to the mute, to the stutterer, to the stranger, that the poem must be offered, and not to the chatterbox, to the grammarian, or to the nationalist. It is to the proletarians – whom Marx defined as those who have nothing except their own body capable of work – that we must give the entire earth, as well as all the books, and all the music, and all the paintings, and all the sciences. What is more, it is to them, to the proletarians in all their forms, that the poem of communism must be offered.’

Of course, there are always forces pulling poets in the other direction. Like everything else, poetry is a contested space. The broadsheets, the BBC and most literary festivals are dominated by corporate publishers and a celebrity star-system. The whole apparatus of arts-coverage by press-release, celebrity book-festivals, short-lists, awards and prize-giving ceremonies seems almost designed to alienate as many people as possible from poetry – except as consumers. The result is the victory march of Dullness, characterised by humorlessness, political indifference, a disregard for tradition, a serious underestimation of poetry’s music and a snobbish hostility to amateurs. And all decorated in the usual language of PR disguised as literary criticism (‘sexy’, ‘dark’, ‘sassy’, ‘edgy’, ‘bold’, ‘daring’ etc).

POETRY CAN NEVER BE PROPERTY

Last year I published, at Smokestack Books, a collection of poems by the Newcastle writer Sheree Mack. Sheree’s mother is of Ghanaian and Bajan ancestry; her father is from Trinidad. Laventille told the story of the 1970 Black Power Revolution in Trinidad and Tobago, when for forty-five days an uprising of students, trade unions and the disaffected poor threatened to overthrow the government. It was a courageous and beautiful book, an original attempt to combine history and poetry as a ‘shrine of remembrances’ for the ordinary people behind the headlines.

A few weeks after the book was published Sheree found herself accused of borrowing phrases without attribution from other poets. Most were happy to see elements of their work resurrected and re-made like this, but a few were not. Although I variously offered to insert erratum slips in the book, to reprint the book with the necessary acknowledgements, and to print a new version of the book without the poems in question, Sheree’s accusers seemed more interested in mobilising a howling mob on social-media, armed with the usual pitchforks and burning torches. There followed several weeks of extraordinary personal abuse directed at author and publisher, a feature on Channel 4 News, demands that Sheree should be stripped of her qualifications and sacked from her teaching job, an editorial in Poetry News, and threats of legal action from two corporate publishers. Several festivals withdrew invitations for Sheree to read from the book. Eventually the book was withdrawn from sale and pulped.

I do not believe for a minute that Sheree intended to ‘steal’ anyone else’s work. Some of her borrowings were so obvious that they did not need acknowledging (any more than her poem called ‘What’s Going On?’ did not need to spell out its debt to Marvin Gaye). ‘Laventille Love Song’ for example, did not attempt to disguise its debt to Langston Hughes’ ‘Juke Box Love Song’. The point of the poem was to throw together two different moments in Black history, dialectically linked by the deliberate echoes of one poem in the other.

Sheree’s fault was one of omission and carelessness; the reaction of her accusers was deliberate, hysterical and disproportionate. Sheree made no attempt to conceal her borrowings, she did not profit from them, she has apologised for them repeatedly and she has been excessively punished. No-one has lost anything – except a sense of proportion and decency. Sheree’s faults may be forgiven; the venom of her pursuers is unforgiveable. And a beautiful, revolutionary book has been lost.

I am not interested in calculating how many words a poet may borrow from another writer without being accused of ‘theft’, or swapping examples of successful plagiarists – most notably, of course, Shakespeare, Stendhal and Brecht. (For the record, my last three books were comic verse-novels based on Hamlet, Nineteen Eighty-four and Don Juan.) But I am fascinated by the moral panic around ‘intellectual property’ in the contemporary poetry world, in the way that notions of private property have entered the world of poetry.

Property is a very recent (and contested) innovation in human history, usually used to determine access to scarce or limited resources such as land, buildings, the means of production, manufactured goods and money. It is a shifting concept; not so long ago, women, children and slaves were subject to property law; today we have ‘copyright’, ‘intellectual property’, ‘identity theft’ and ‘image rights’.

There are three kinds of property – common property (where resources are governed by rules which make them available for use by all or any members of the society), collective property (where the community as a whole determines how important resources are to be used), and private property (where contested resources are assigned to particular individuals).

It is difficult to see how the many various elements of any poem – words, phrases, grammatical structures, rhyme and metre, emotional syntax, allusions, echoes, patterns, imagery and metaphor etc – can be described as ‘property’ in any of the above senses (except perhaps ‘common property’). None of these elements are scarce or finite; their use by one person does not preclude their use by any number of others. In an age of mechanical reproduction, it is not possible to ‘steal’ a poem or part of a poem, only to copy it.

POETRY BELONGS TO EVERYONE

All poetry inhabits the common language of everyday living. A poem can be unique without being original; it can be ‘new’ at the same time that it is already known. As the French communist poet Francis Combes has argued:

‘Poetry belongs to everyone. Poetry does not belong to a small group of specialists. It arises from the everyday use of language. Like language, poetry only exists because we share it. Writing, singing, painting, cooking – these are ways of sharing pleasure. For me poetry is like an electrical transformer which converts our feelings and our ideas into energy. It is a way of keeping your feet on the ground without losing sight of the stars. It is at the same time both the world’s conscience and its best dreams; it’s an intimate language and a public necessity.’

Most important human activities are not subject to ideas of ownership. Talking, walking, whistling, running, making love, speaking a foreign language, cooking, playing football, baking bread, dancing, conversation, knitting, drawing – these are all acquired skills which we learn by imitating others, but they are not subject to ideas of ownership.

Historically, poetry was always understood to be much closer to these than to those things that the law regards as ‘property’ (land, money etc). No-one in, say fourteenth-century Italy would have understood the idea of ‘stealing’ a poem. Most cultures, even today, regard poetry as ‘common property’. You don’t hear many ‘original’ poems at an Urdu-Punjabi musha’ara. Everyone borrows/steals/copies/appropriates poetry in prison. Which is another way of saying that everyone owns it. And if everyone owns it, there is nothing to steal.

Until very recently in human history, poets were popularly understood to speak for and to the societies to which they belonged. The development of printing and publishing and the emergence of a reading-public have helped to elevate poets into a separate and professional caste. The Romantic idea of the sensitive individual alienated from ordinary society (by education, sensibility and mobility) has become in our time the cult of the international poet as exile, crossing cultural, intellectual and linguistic borders. This cult reached its logical conclusion a few years ago with the Martian poets, who wrote about life on earth as if they really were aliens.

The current moral panic over ‘plagiarism in poetry’ seems to derive from several overlapping elements – the post-Romantic privatisation of feeling and language, the fetishisation of ‘novelty’ in contemporary culture, half-hearted notions of intellectual property, the long-term consequences of Creative Writing moving from university adult education onto campus as an academic subject, the creation of a large pool of Creative Writing graduates competing for publication, jobs and prizes and the decline in the number of poetry publishers. If poetry is privatised, a personalised form of individual expression rather a means of public communication, then it needs to be policed by ideas of copyright, grammatical rules, unified spelling, critical standards and a canonical tradition.

The witch-hunting of Sheree Mack was an instructive episode in the internal workings of intellectual hegemony. The corporate lawyers and national media only joined the chase after a handful of poets (most of whom had not read Laventille) had already attacked one of their own, in the name of economic forces which are inimical to poetry.

Poetry arises out of the contradictions and consolations of a whole life and a whole society. It requires the proper humility necessary for any art. Poetry is not a Meritocracy of the educated, the privileged or the lucky. It is a Republic. Poetry is indivisible. If it doesn’t belong to everybody, it is something else – show business, big business, self-promotion, attention-seeking, property. As Alain Badiou argues:

‘Poets are communist for a primary reason, which is absolutely essential: their domain is language, most often their native tongue. Now language is what is given to all from birth as an absolutely common good. Poets are those who try to make a language say what it seems incapable of saying. Poets are those who seem to create in language new names to name that which, before the poem, has no name. And it is essential for poetry that these inventions, these creations, which are internal to language, have the same destiny as the mother tongue itself: for them to be given to all without exception. The poem is a gift of the poet to language. But this gift, like language itself, is destined to the common – that is, to this anonymous point where what matters is not one person in particular, but all, in the singular. Thus, the great poets of the twentieth century recognized the grandiose revolutionary project of communism something that was familiar to them – namely that, as the poem gives its inventions to language and as language is given to all, the material world and the world of thought must be given integrally to all, becoming no longer the property of a few but the common good of humanity as a whole.’

Andy Croft reports on his recent visit to Basra, for the Al-Marbed international poetry festival.

I have never seen so many people at a poetry festival before – or so many Kalashnikovs. A few weeks ago I was in the southern Iraqi city of Basra with my friend the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan. We were guests of the Iraqi Writers Union for the thirteenth annual Al-Marbed international poetry festival.

‘Poetry is the Present and Future of Basra’ read the banner over the stage in the main hall of the Basra International Hotel where most of the readings were held. Dedicated to the late Iraqi poet and communist Mehdi Mohammad Ali, the festival attracted almost a hundred poets, from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Kuwait, Sudan, Iraq, Assyria, Lebanon, Syria and the Iraqi diaspora scattered across the world.

During a crowded week of readings and debates, poetry and music, food and friendship, we visited the birthplace of Basra’s most famous poet Badr Shakir al Sayyab, as well as the Basra international football stadium. There was a showing of the film Samt al-Rai/The Silence of the Shepherd introduced by its director Raad Mushatat. One of the festival readings took place on a river cruise on the Shat al-Arab waterway.

The British poetry world likes to think it is popular, with its prizes and awards and celebrities. But this is nothing compared to the role of poetry in Arab culture, where TV shows like Million’s Poet and Prince of Poets regularly attract more viewers than football. Although six million Iraqis – 20% of the population – cannot read or write, the idea that poetry is a publicly-owned, shared and common language somehow persists across all classes. At some of the evening readings, there must have been a thousand people, men and women, young and old. One of the most striking performances was by a six year old boy reciting, entirely from memory, a ten minute long poem comparing Iraq to a beautiful woman.

Although Amarjit and I did not know the literal meaning of many of the poems, we were able to concentrate on the richness of their different cadences and rhythms. Thanks to our hard working translators we were also introduced to the work of some fascinating poets, including Iraqi poets Abdulkareem Kasid and Chawki Abdelamir, Hani al-Selwy from Yemen, Mojtaba Al Tatan from Bahrain, Sabah Kasim, Najah Ibrahim, and Souzan Ibrahim from Syria, and Al Wathiq Younis from Sudan.

But of course the festival was taking place in a deadly context. Iraq is still at war. The billboards by the side of the roads advertise, not consumer goods, but the faces of young men killed fighting Daesh. Each night I was woken by the sound of gunfire to mark the repatriation of local boys killed fighting in Mosul. A notice outside the new shopping centre in Times Square solemnly reminds shoppers, ‘No smoking. No weapons’.

With a heavily armed security presence at most of the readings, it was hardly surprising that the festival was a serious-minded affair. There were no stand-up poets, comics or performance poets. Instead most of the poets recited long poems usually about the suffering and grief of the Iraqi people.

An old man read a poem about the death of his son, killed fighting in Fallujah. One poet compared Iraqi children to a forest of young trees cut down before they are full grown. Another observed that every Iraqi child grows up with an older brother called Death. There was a long poem about a local teacher injured by a Daesh car-bomb; although she managed to crawl out of the car, her clothes were on fire (which meant that her modesty before God was threatened) so she climbed back into the burning car to die. Another poet described the poor of the world as the fuel that keeps the fires of war burning. The prayers of the religious, he said, do not belong to God, only the tears of a mother grieving for her dead child.

It is more important than ever that we understand as much as we can about our neighbours on this small planet. Despite the commercial, ideological, cultural and political pressures to emphasise our uniqueness and our separateness, the differences between us are not very great. The Al-Marbed poetry festival is a brave and important reminder that poetry is one of the ways in which we can enjoy and explore those differences and at the same time assert our shared humanity.

This article was first published in the Morning Star.

]]>info@culturematters.org.uk (Andy Croft )PoetrySat, 04 Mar 2017 20:49:51 +0000Long live those who died like dogshttps://culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/poetry/item/2386-long-live-those-who-died-like-dogs
https://culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/poetry/item/2386-long-live-those-who-died-like-dogs

Andy Croft reminds us of the radicalism of the early Dadaist movement.

A hundred years after the Cabaret Voltaire first opened its doors in Zurich, it is hard to remember just how shocking, how provocative and how radical the early Dadaist movement once was. Their extraordinary innovations in performance and technique are now commonplace and barely noticed gestures in the worlds of advertising and corporate culture. One of the most important art movements of the twentieth-century is routinely gutted of its radicalism and reduced to the status of an ‘inheritance track’ for Malcolm McLaren, Vic Reeves and Lady Gaga.

In their centenary year it is especially important to remind ourselves how the Dadaists emerged out of intellectual opposition to the Great War, and how far and how quickly the movement spread across Europe in its aftermath. One of the Dada manifestos was written by the French writer Louis Aragon:

No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians, no more sculptors, no more religions, no more republicans, no more royalists, no more imperialists, no more anarchists, no more socialists, no more Bolsheviks, no more politicians, no more proletarians, no more democrats, no more armies, no more police, no more nations, no more of these idiocies, no more, no more, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING...

Like many of the original Dadaists (including Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard and Andre Breton), Aragon was later a member of the French Communist Party and active in the French Resistance during the Second World War. But in the early 1920s, it seemed to Aragon and to other radical writers and artists that Nihilism was the only rational and revolutionary response to the industrialised slaughter of the Great War.

The Flemish writer Paul van Ostaijen (1896-1928) first met Dadaism in Berlin in 1919, where he witnessed the suppression of the Spartacist uprising. Although Van Ostaijen is too little known in the UK, he was one of the most original and influential Belgian writers of the twentieth century. An avant-garde poet, satirist and revolutionary critic, he opened up Flemish poetry to modern city life, introduced Expressionism into Belgium, and was the first writer to translate Kafka from German.

Van Ostaijen’s most important work was the epic poem Occupied City/Bezette Stad, now published for the first time in English, in a translation by David Colmer (Smokestack Books, £12):

Nihil in every direction / Nihil in every family / Nihil in every language and every dialect / NIHIL in every symbol / rotating nihil / nihil in saltire... rotating nihil / square nihil / triangular nihil / pyramidal NIHIL...

When Occupied City was first published in 1921 it was advertised as ‘a book devoid of Biblical beauty / a book for royalists and republicans / for doctors and illiterates / a book that lists every important song of the last ten years / in short: as indispensable as a cookbook / “What every girl should know.”’

It is impossible to do justice to this extraordinary work simply by quoting from it, since the book was designed and illustrated by the Flemish artist Oscar Jespers as a work of ‘rhythmical typography’, a huge, crazy, irreverent poem for a noisy chorus of many voices in as many different languages, a riot of type-faces all exploding in every direction across the pages. Above is an example, an image of Dead Sunday, one of the poems in the collection. And here is an ‘extract’ from the poem about the German occupation of Antwerp during the First World War, which van Ostaijen experienced at first-hand:

But Occupied City is more than a typographic novelty or a museum-piece. It is a sustained attack on monarchism, militarism and patriotism and a declaration of war on post-1918 Europe (Karl Liebknecht makes a brief appearance in the poem):

Andy Croft wrote The Privatisation of Poetry for Culture Matters a few months ago, and it has been amongst the most popular and influential articles on the site. He has attracted a good deal of criticism for his application of communist philosophy to poetry. Here, in an article republished from The Argotist Online, he defends and extends the thesis advanced in that article. See also Alain Badiou, Communism by Way of the Poem, and Alan Morrison, The Poetry of Common Ownership.

Q. Is there a difference between allusion and plagiarism?

The difference seems to be measured simply by the varying noise levels of approval or outrage. If readers and reviewers think that they recognise most of the sources that inform the work of a well-known writer, then they are applauded as ‘allusive’, ‘inter-textual’ and ‘ludic’. Anything else is ‘plagiarism’.

Personally I have never been remotely interested in ‘plagiarism’ scandals, which always seem to me to demean everyone involved, like excitable children accusing each other of copying. All poets writing in English use the same language, the same alphabet and the same grammatical structure. We are all inheritors of the same literary traditions. We all drink from the same well. No poet should be so lacking in humility as to think that they can ever write anything that is ‘original’. All any of us can ever hope to do is to restate in a contemporary idiom what has already been said, probably by much better poets than we can ever be. An original poem is as impossible as an original colour. Which is perhaps why, for all the current emphasis on poets finding their ‘voice’, so many contemporary poets sound the same...

The intellectual content of a poem may be a slightly different issue. But how many poets can you think of whose work is intellectually ‘original’? And how many original ideas do any of us ever have? Unless you are Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Marx or Einstein, I think it is probably wise not to demand that other people should be original in their thinking. Anyway, the achievement of even these men would have been impossible without the work of their predecessors; as Newton put it, ‘if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ In the circumstances, it seems to me that those poets who gaily accuse others of lacking ‘originality’ should look again at their own work with a bit more humility.

Perhaps we can return to the question of originality later. But let’s grant for the moment that originality in any form isn’t possible and agree that all we can do is restate what has already been said. Doesn’t the hope to which you point – to ‘restate’ existing ideas in new language, to see further than our predecessors – imply that a poet can fail to restate what’s already been said and simply repeat it? That he or she can fail to ‘see further’ and rather see the same thing as another poet and call it new? Milton in his Eikonclastes wrote, ‘For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not better'd by the borrower, among good Authors is accounted Plagiarie.’ If you don’t want to call inept or inartistic borrowing ‘plagiarism,’ I can accept that. Perhaps we could agree to call it a bad poem or say it’s not poem at all or that it (or the best part of it) is someone else’s poem. In any case, don’t poets (or ‘poets’) who liberally borrow from other poets and fail to improve on the original fail at the thing you seem to think a poem at the very least should do?

Yes, of course. The fear of repeating oneself, never mind other people, must be a constant for all writers. But notions of ‘originality’ are relative. I have spent too many years working in primary schools and in prisons not to know that what may seem derivative, clichéd, tired or borrowed to some readers, can feel like an exciting and original achievement to others. The ability to ‘see further than our predecessors’ is largely dependent on education and cultural access. A cliché is only a cliché if you have read it before. In one sense, the making of any poem, no matter how clumsy or derivative, is to be celebrated. As the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra put it, ‘In poetry everything is permitted. // With only this condition of course, / You have to improve the blank page.’ How many of us can confidently say to ourselves that we always do that?

Q. Are there different kinds of plagiarism? If so, are some forms of plagiarism better, more creative, or more interesting than others? Are there forms that are less creative or interesting in your view?

The work that goes into writing any poem is impossible to quantify. First, there is a life-time of reading, thinking, listening, talking and understanding; second, the conscious effort to concentrate an idea, fix a memory or crystallise a feeling in words; third, the patient struggle with the organisation, shape and form of the words on the page and the sound of their music in your head; fourth, a series of critical judgements as to when the work is finished; fifth, an evaluation of the poem’s likely relationship with other readers. Buried somewhere inside all this are the various stages at which the poet consciously and unconsciously uses their various source materials, internal and external. Who can judge which part of the process, or which versions, are more ‘creative’ than others? Who cares? The only question that should concern us, is whether a poem is as good as it can be, given the circumstances of the writer, the writing and its reception.

Q. So are you saying that readers of poetry can’t draw from established critical standards (of whatever sort) or form new standards in order to evaluate the quality of poetry? It seems disingenuous to imply that every poem is as good as every other poem as long as it’s ‘as good as it can be.’ A good limerick is a good limerick, but I don’t think many people would agree that a good limerick, however good, is as good as a good sestina. Analogously, there are better and worse examples of poetic borrowing and more skilful – more artful – ways of drawing on our shared poetic past or from contemporary works. Many poets who borrow lines, ideas, or images and wish to do so skilfully include notes in their books that indicate their sources, especially if those sources are less well known. Does a poet have the obligation to ‘cite’ her sources in some way if she is borrowing material? Is there a certain amount of material or threshold that warrants acknowledgement, particularly if the source is contemporary?

There are so many obstacles between any poem and any reader; signposts on the page like title, epigraph, acknowledgement, glossary etc can only help. Unless of course, they are too obvious, distracting or cumbersome. Personally I am not interested in calculating how many words a poet may borrow from another writer without being accused of ‘theft’, or swapping examples of successful plagiarists – most notably, of course, Shakespeare, Stendhal and Brecht. And just for the record, my last three books were comic verse-novels based on Hamlet, Nineteen Eighty-four and Don Juan.

Clearly in the present climate everyone has to be careful to cover their backs to avoid being dragged into the next public row with the self-appointed commissars now sniffing around the poetry world for unattributed borrowings. A few months ago, at a book-launch in Nottingham, I read a new poem of mine called ‘The Sailors of Ulm’. Before doing so I explained that the poem is supposed to ‘echo’ Louis MacNeice’s ‘Thalassa’, and that the title refers to Lucio Magri’s history of the PCI, Il Sarto di Ulm, which itself was a reference to Brecht’s poem ‘The Tailor of Ulm’. By way of apology for such a laboured introduction, I joked that I was covering myself in case there was anyone in the audience from the poetry-police. The following day one of the principal witch-hunters in the Laventille affair (who was not there) e-mailed the organisers of the reading to ask if he could confirm that I had insulted the poetry police.

But how do you argue that a good sestina is ‘better’ than a limerick? The world is full of entertaining limericks and dull, clanking sestinas. I can think of many occasions when I would rather read a good limerick than a sestina. And if anyone doubts the value of a good limerick, I can do no better than recommend The Limerickiad, Smokestack Books’ three volume (soon to be four) raucous, clever history of Eng Lit in limericks by Martin Rowson.

Anyway, who is comparing? What is the point of the comparison? In what way is a sestina ‘better’ than a limerick? What is the measure? The amount of time needed to read them? The amount of ink required to write them? If a sestina is ’better’ than a limerick, how does it compare to a villanelle? Personally I have always found terza rima difficult to write, but ottava rima enjoyable to read; so how can I say which form is ‘better’? Is anyone prepared to argue that the iambic foot used in most sestinas is superior to the amphibrach of the limerick? Or are we making a judgement about the relative seriousness of the subject-matter usually carried by the two forms? But who says that light-verse is inferior to ‘heavy’ verse? This sounds like the old university senior common-room game of Golden Poets and Silver Poets, Major and Minor, Gentlemen and Players.

The pressure to evaluate and grade poems and poets seems to me to be both unattractive and pointless. What is ‘better’, a motorbike or a banana? It depends if you are in a hurry or if you are hungry.

Q. I think the Milton quote referred to earlier might clear Shakespeare, Stendahl, and Brecht from the label of plagiarist and I’m assuming whatever source materials you drew from for your verse novel, 1948, were in some way skilfully acknowledged. But to return to your answer to the previous question, there seem to be many people who care whether large or small portions of other peoples’ poems end up in another poet’s work, namely poets who find their work published under another person’s name. Let’s pose a hypothetical situation and consider 1948. I notice that both you and the illustrator of the book retained your copyright. Would you be comfortable with someone reprinting unattributed portions of the book under their name or repurposing the images in an uncreative context (i.e. not as part of a new work of art that transforms the source material but ‘as is’ or with slight modification) without attribution?

The copyright statement inside 1948 was put in by the publisher. If somebody seriously wanted to copy some or all of the 150 onyeginskaya sonnets in 1948 I would be flattered. First of all it would mean that someone had read the damn thing! Secondly it would presumably mean that they had enjoyed the book enough to want to do this. And if they were able to ‘improve’ on the original then good luck to them. It certainly won’t earn them any money!

My impression is that those who are most outraged by revelations or accusations of plagiarism in the poetry world are not usually the ‘victims’, but other would-be writers who feel that their own route to literary success is suddenly compromised. What is the point of spending all those years on Creative Writing programmes developing their unique ‘individual’ voice if it turns out that it is not to so exclusively theirs after all?

Q. A follow up to the previous question: How do you handle copyright at your own press? Most Creative Commons licenses require at the minimum attribution credit for material designated for reuse or repurposing. But they do have a ‘No Rights Reserved’ option (CC0) (https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/). Would you consider publishing your work or the work of your authors under a ‘No Rights Reserved’ Creative Commons license? Would your authors be comfortable with seeing their poems published in a journal under another poet’s name?

I don’t know – I’m not a lawyer! I have run Smokestack Books for twelve years single-handedly and unpaid. In this time I have published 110 titles and sold almost 30k books. I do not have the time, the energy, or the interest to pursue this kind of stuff about copyright. All Smokestack titles carry the usual statement about the author retaining copyright to their work. As far as I am concerned it is a formality. If I am approached by an editor who wants to include a poem by a Smokestack author in an anthology I pass this request to the poet.

Q. Let’s shift topics for a minute. To what degree does the economic structure of the ‘poetry business’ -- a structure which may lead a poet to feel pressured to produce a certain amount or certain kind of work in order to secure grants or academic employment -- contribute to what your average person might call poetic plagiarism (an instance in which a poet takes another poet's work and with little or no modification and claims authorship)?

The narrow economics of the contemporary poetry scene in the UK undoubtedly encourages the idea of poetry as property. This seems to me to be a wholly pernicious idea, inimical to genuine creativity. It derives in part from the way that the broadsheets, the BBC, the corporate festivals and the prize-giving circus create and maintain a hierarchy of poets (and a hierarchical idea of poetry) based on the lists of corporate publishers. It is also a result of the way that so many poets much further down the food chain these days make a poor living as part-time Creative Writing teachers in universities.

It is worth remembering that Creative Writing in the UK emerged as an academic subject a long time before universities realised that they could make money out of it. When I worked for Leeds University in the early 1980s I was told that I couldn’t teach Creative Writing because it was not a ‘proper academic subject’. Eventually I was permitted to teach it, but only as part of a special programme of free courses designed for unemployed people in Middlesbrough (a long way from the university). Of course, Leeds University, like all UK universities, now runs undergraduate and post-graduate degree programmes in Creative Writing. But I don’t imagine that many unemployed people can afford them.

The origins of Creative Writing in the UK lie a long way from Higher Education – in Adult Education, Women’s Education, community arts and organisations like the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. The sudden and distorting presence of the universities in the poetry economy has brought with it the imported ideas of intellectual property, critical hierarchies, career-structures as well as the instincts of corporate lawyers.

If poetry is a commodity, it needs to be policed (grammatical rules, unified spelling, critical standards, canonical tradition etc). And before it can be sold, it has to be owned (copyright and intellectual property etc). There is a direct connection, I think, between the commodification of poetry and the privatisation of poetry as a personalised form of individual expression rather a means of public communication.

Q. Hold on now! Poets have proclaimed their originality and criticized others for taking credit for their or other poets’ work (in whole or in part) since antiquity. But, again, let’s stay with the current topic and restate this last question. Does the poet who chooses to be a part of the of the contemporary ‘poetry business,’ a business which is predicated on the traffic of poems that contain ‘the original ‘voice’ of the poet,’ as you put it, or of the deliberate (and acknowledged) subversion of such ‘voice’ poems, have the obligation to make clear what it is that they are purveying within that marketplace?

No. Poetry is not a marketplace and a poem is not a commodity to be bought and sold.

Perhaps I may be allowed to regurgitate something I have previously written (self-plagiarism?) on this issue. Property is a very recent (and contested) innovation in human history, usually used to determine access to scarce or limited resources such as land, buildings, the means of production, manufactured goods and money. It is a shifting concept; not so long ago, women, children and slaves were subject to property law. Today we have ‘copyright’, ‘intellectual property’, ‘identity theft’, ‘image rights’ – and the ludicrous spectacle of a chain of British opticians claiming legal ownership over the word ‘Should’ve’, while a Danish brewery apparently owns the copyright to the word ‘probably’.

There are three kinds of property – common property (where resources are governed by rules which make them available for use by all or any members of the society), collective property (where the community as a whole determines how important resources are to be used), and private property (where contested resources are assigned to particular individuals). It is difficult to see how the many various elements of any poem – words, phrases, grammatical structures, rhyme and metre, emotional syntax, allusions, echoes, patterns, imagery and metaphor etc – can be described as ‘property’ in any of the above senses, except perhaps ‘common property’. None of these elements are scarce or finite; their use by one person does not preclude their use by any number of others. In an age of mechanical reproduction, it is not possible to ‘steal’ a poem or part of a poem, only to repeat it.

All poetry inhabits the common language of everyday living. A poem can be unique without being original; it can be ‘new’ at the same time that it is already known. As my friend the French poet Francis Combes has argued:

Poetry belongs to everyone. Poetry does not belong to a small group of specialists. It arises from the everyday use of language. Like language, poetry only exists because we share it. Writing, singing, painting, cooking – these are ways of sharing pleasure. For me poetry is like an electrical transformer which converts our feelings and our ideas into energy. It is a way of keeping your feet on the ground without losing sight of the stars. It is at the same time both the world’s conscience and its best dreams; it’s an intimate language and a public necessity.

Most important human activities are not subject to ideas of ownership. Talking, walking, whistling, running, making love, speaking a foreign language, cooking, playing football, baking bread, dancing, conversation, knitting, drawing – these are all acquired skills which we learn by imitating others, but they are not subject to ideas of ownership.

Historically, poetry was always understood to be much closer to these than to those things that the law regards as ‘property’ (land, money etc). No one in, say, fourteenth-century Italy would have understood the idea of ‘stealing’ a poem. Most cultures, even today, regard poetry as ‘common property’. Which is another way of saying that everyone owns it. And if everyone owns it, there is nothing to steal.

There are so many interesting things here I’d like to ask you about. But first, as a point of fact, poets in fourteenth century Italy would definitely have understood the idea of stealing a poem, although what they thought was important was the formal structure of the canzone. ‘Theirs was a literature that strove for originality of form almost above all else,’ Chambers notes in his Introduction to Old Provencal. As an example of this concern, he quotes elsewhere in his book the 12th century troubadour Peire d'Alvernhe’s line, ‘never was a song good or of any value which resembled the songs of another.’

But I think that it would be rather difficult to write a history of, say, Blues or Folk Music in these terms. And there are many poetic traditions – Urdu for example – which rely very heavily on shared phrases and commonly used figures of speech.

Anyone who enjoys generic fiction will tell you that part of the pleasure of this kind of reading is the recognition of its familiar patterns. Not many readers of westerns or hospital romances, for example, will thank an author for radically disrupting their expectations of the form.

One of the reasons I write almost entirely in traditional stanzas – metrically precise, rhymingly obsessive, formal straight-jackets – is the creation of a shared, anticipated music with the listener. It is like joining a traditional dance with complicated steps that everyone knows. This only works if each new song in some way ‘resembles’ the songs of others.

Q. But I’m glad you brought up this period of literary history because I think it prompts a really interesting question about the complicated relationship throughout history between authorship and originality and ownership and ‘the marketplace,’ however we define that. We find these complications in Greece in Pindar’s work and at Rome in Martial’s (who first brought the notion of ‘plagiary’ – kidnapping – into a literary context). We find it the Renaissance when the word ‘plagiary’ first enters English. And of course we find it today.

Whether we want to call it originality or not, authorship and being recognized as the author of a work seems to be central to poets’ self-understanding to this day, even among the communist poets you refer to in your essay and among those who largely agree with your points about language and poetry.

A case in point might be the American novelist Jonathan Lethem, who was interviewed after the publication of his excellent essay, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence,’ which makes many of the same points you’ve made about language, the commons, and the impossibility of writing anything fully original. In an interview following it (forgive the long quote), he clarified his views on originality, saying, ‘I think originality is a word of praise for things that have been expressed in a marvellous way and that make points of origin for any particular element beside the point. When you read Saul Bellow or listen to Bob Dylan sing, you can have someone point to various cribbings and it won’t matter, because something has been arrived at which subsumes and incorporates and transcends these matters. In that way, sourcing and originality are two sides of the same coin, they’re a nested partnership.’ He goes on to expand on what he means by ‘originality’ by relating it to the notion of ‘surprise’: ‘You want to feel surprised. If my description proposes some sort of dutiful, grinding, crossword puzzle work—‘let me take some Raymond Chandler here and graft it to some Philip K. Dick over here’—that’s horrendous. You, the author, want to experience something that feels surprising and uncanny and native. You want to take all your sourcing and turn it into an experience that—for you first and foremost, and then of course for the reader—feels strong or urgent in a way that mimics some kind of natural, automatic process.’

All of this leads me to a two-part question. First, as opposed to what we might call a ‘strong’ notion of originality, one that sees authors as capable of coming up with wholly original thoughts and expressions over which they can claim total ownership, Lethem seems to be putting forward what we might call a ‘weak’ notion of originality, one that emphasizes the author’s ability to surprise herself and us regardless of source material. I’m interested in what you might think of Lethem’s take on the word ‘originality,’ which in spirit seems to be not that far from Milton.

Second, from the perspective of Lethem’s ‘weak’ notion of originality, it seems like you’re conflating ‘strong’ notions of ‘originality’ and ‘ownership’ – possessiveness over property rights – with ‘authorship’ and ‘originality’ in the weaker sense – surprisingly marvelous writing and the pride that comes with such accomplishment. You criticize those who decry plagiarism as defenders of private property because you believe that a poem is not a commodity that can be bought or sold and that it’s on these strong grounds that they base their objections. But is it fair to say that it’s on those grounds that most people find the plagiarist pathetic? Mightn’t the objectors to plagiarism/inept borrowing/bad poems (however we want to describe unsurprising writing) be objecting to the plagiarist’s false (and rather sad) claims of authorship and his implicit denial of others’ surprising achievements (however modest) rather than any violation of notions of ownership?

I like the concept of ‘surprising’ writing, although it has to be said British literary culture seems interested only in ‘unsurprising’ writing at the moment. I don’t know Jonathan Lethem’s work, or this essay, but it sounds like a very useful account of my sense of the way I write. During the two days we have been conducting this conversation by e-mail, I have also been writing an obituary, proof-reading a children’s novel, copy-editing an anthology of poetry and trying to finish a poem about the refugee crisis in Europe. I have also written about sixty e-mails and half a dozen letters. But I don’t think that it is true to say that I have been exercising a ‘weak’ originality for most of the time and saving my ‘strong’ originality only for the poem (especially as it borrows, self-consciously, some phrases from Byron’s Childe Harold). Or does such deliberate – and irreverent – borrowing represent a kind of ‘strong’ originality in itself? Which kind of ‘originality’ are you and I using in this conversation?

And why should the poetry world suddenly be the focus of these questions about ownership. Why now? Why poetry? Why not the worlds of, say, ventriloquism, athletics, topiary or pottery? Who benefits from the importation of this legal vocabulary into poetry?

The current moral panic over ‘plagiarism in poetry’ seems to me to derive from several overlapping elements – the post-Romantic privatisation of feeling and language, the fetishisation of ‘novelty’ in contemporary culture, half-hearted notions of intellectual property, the long-term consequences of Creative Writing moving from university adult education onto campus as an academic subject, the professionalization of poetry, and the creation of a large pool of Creative Writing graduates competing for publication, jobs and prizes at the same time as a catastrophic decline in the number of poetry publishers.

The result is an unpleasantly competitive poetic culture, once described by the poet Sean O’Brien as a bunch of ‘ferrets fighting for mastery of a septic tank.’ If there were any money involved it would be tragic. But considering the tiny amounts of money that anyone ever earns from poetry in the UK, there is something grimly comical about poets accusing each other of stealing something which belongs to everyone.

Snig was always losing things. One day he lost his hat. The next day he lost his umbrella. When he put things down, he forgot where he had put them. When he picked things up, he forgot to put them down. He was very forgetful. Sometimes Snig thought he had lost his memory. But where had he put it? He couldn’t remember. Poor little Snig.

It wasn’t much fun being Snig. He wanted to have fun, but the other silly creatures kept all the fun to themselves. Some people have all the fun. And they wouldn’t share it with Snig. When Snig complained, they said he was spoiling everyone else’s fun. They said he had lost his sense of humour.

Perhaps they were right. Snig used to have a sense of humour. But he didn’t know where he had put it. He looked under the bed. He looked in the cupboard. He looked in his pockets. But he just couldn’t find it anywhere. It wasn’t funny. Poor little Snig.

He tried to be patient. But his patience was wearing thin, especially when the other silly creatures called him names. Snig didn’t know what to say.‘Lost your tongue! Lost your tongue!’ they shouted. ‘Loser! Loser!’Snig’s patience finally snapped. Ow! That hurt!

Snig ran away into the forest and bumped into a tree. Ow! That hurt too.He tripped over a root. Ow! So did that.He sat down on some nettles. Ow! And that.Poor little Snig had hurt his feelings.

And now he had lost his patience. Snig looked everywhere in the forest for it. He looked high and low, but he couldn’t find it. He looked down and out. But he still couldn’t find it. Snig looked up at the silvery stars and the cold and lonely moon and closed his eyes. He felt sad that he had lost his patience. It was even worse than losing his sense of humour. But where had he put it? Snig walked deeper into the forest to find his patience.

‘Are you looking for trouble?’ asked the grizzly bears.‘Certainly not,’ said Snig. He didn’t want any trouble.

‘Are you looking for an argument?’ asked the prickly bushes.‘Certainly not,’ said Snig. He didn’t want an argument.

‘Are you looking for a fight?’ asked the wild flowers.‘Certainly not,’ said Snig. He didn’t want a fight.

By now it was cold and dark. Poor little Snig was all alone in the middle of the forest. He didn’t know which way to go. It wasn’t fair. Why was he always losing things? First he lost his hat and his umbrella. Then he lost his sense of humour. He had lost his tongue. He had lost his patience. And now he had lost his way. The other silly creatures were right after all. Snig was just a loser.

Snig continued walking into the forest. After a while he met a creature who looked very hot and bothered. ‘Have you seen my patience?’ asked Snig.‘I’d like to help you,’ said the hot and sweaty creature, ‘but I’ve lost my cool, and I need to find it.’ He started sweating again and ran off.

Snig continued walking into the forest. After a while he met a creature who kept falling over. ‘Have you seen my patience?’ asked Snig.‘I’d like to help you,’ said the clumsy creature, ‘but I’ve lost my nerve, and I need to find it.’ He fell over again and ran off.

Snig continued walking into the forest. After a while he met a very thin creature. ‘Have you seen my patience?’ asked Snig.‘I’d like to help you,’ said the very thin creature, ‘but I’ve lost my appetite, and I need to find it.’ He rubbed his thin ribs and ran off.

Snig sat down under a tree and tried to sleep. It was cold. Brrr! Just then it started raining. Snig wished he had brought his hat and his umbrella. But then he remembered he had lost them. Poor little Snig.

When Snig thought about his hat, he felt a hot tear roll down his face. When he thought about his umbrella, another tear rolled down his face. He thought about his sense of humour and his patience. And he cried and he cried and he cried.

Snig was still crying when he arrived home. The other silly creatures were running around, having all the fun, as usual. When they saw Snig they stopped and pointed at him.‘Loser! Loser!’ they shouted. Snig tried to ignore them.‘Loser! Loser!’ they shouted, more loudly. Snig pretended he couldn’t hear them‘Loser! Loser!’ they shouted louder and louder.This was too much for Snig. He looked up at the silvery stars and the cold and lonely moon, closed his eyes and began to frown.

‘He’s lost his manners,’ said one of the other silly creatures.The frown turned into a moan.‘He’s lost his marbles,’ said another.The moan turned into a groan.‘He’s lost the plot,’ said another.Then the frown turned into a growl. And the growl turned into a great big ROAR!

‘I’ve NOT lost my manners!’ roared Snig. ‘I’ve NOT lost my marbles. And I’ve NOT lost the plot! But I have lost something else. Look – I’ve lost my temper!’ And he roared and he roared and he roared so loudly that all the other silly creatures lost their balance and fell over on their bottoms with a bump. Ow! That hurt!

Snig smiled. The smile turned into a grin. The grin turned into a giggle. And the giggle turned into a great big barrel of laughs. HO! HO! HO!

‘Look!’ laughed Snig, ‘I’ve found my sense of humour!’ And he laughed and laughed at the other silly creatures. He laughed so much that he lost his balance and fell over on his bottom. Ow! That hurt!

The other silly creatures began to smile. The smile turned into a grin. The grin turned into a giggle. And the giggle turned into another great big barrel of laughs. HA! HA! HA! Snig wasn’t a loser after all. He was just like them.

Snig was still laughing when he felt something inside his coat. He put his hand in his pocket. ‘Look!’ he laughed, ‘I’ve found my hat and umbrella! They were here all the time!’

And so Snig stood to his feet, put on his hat, picked up his umbrella and started to hop. And the hop turned into a skip. And the skip turned into a jump. And the jump turned into a dance.

When the other silly creatures saw this they stood to their feet and followed Snig. And soon they were all lost in the dance as they hopped and skipped and jumped together beneath the silvery stars and the cold and lonely moon.